Readers love mysteries and will endlessly work to justify or figure out the details. Whereas if you pedantically point out every little pointless factoid they’ll quibble with you and you’ll probably get some things wrong, and you’re probably not a: Biologist, and an Historian, and a Geologist, and an Astrophysicist, and a Vulcanologist, and an … Read more
One of the most frequent settings of fantasy novels, even secondary world fantasies, is some sort of take on Medieval, or Dark Ages, or Renaissance Europe. Usually Western Europe. Sometimes it’s actually analog Italy or analog Spain, but usually, it’s a mishmash analog of France and the British Isles. Authors frequently borrow concepts and institutions … Read more
It’s a tremendous risk to wax on about how great the most popular adult cartoon on Adult Swim is, and it’s entirely possible doing so will anger a great many people. Nonetheless, I really like Rick and Morty, and I want to write about it, and this probably won’t be the only time. Rick and … Read more
This post contains affiliate links. If you click it and buy something through the link, I get a kickback. I think there’s been a movement to gritty, realistic, highly-detailed secondary worlds. The whole conversation about worldbuilding frequently revolves, especially at a fan level, around how cool it is, and how much of it is there … Read more
This post contains affiliate links, which if you click and purchase the project, give me a small kickback. It can be very tempting to establish all sorts of details about a world, creating a virtual encyclopedia, or a set of linked wikipedias, meandering about and naming heritages and establishing bloodlines and considering traditions in towns … Read more
I think that in the genre of Fantasy, sub-genre Epic in particular, there has been something of a revolution in the last couple of decades, a growing focus on what is referred to as worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is not new. Ancient myths, and legends, and epic poems, built worlds. They defined boundaries and told human beings … Read more